Go-Getter’s Guide to Website Optimization: a Massive SEO Checklist

Website Optimization: On Page SEO

On Page SEO specifies only your website, but there’s a lot to your website. Maybe you think it’s just a few pages, but optimizers see a whole bunch of opportunity to tweak for better user intent, conversions, marketing and ranking. If you don’t know where your site stands according to this list, you need to go check it out!

Technical Optimization

Technical optimization is the part of SEO that a visitor might not actually see or notice. However, what they will notice is how fast your site is. They’ll notice how secure it is, and how well it caters to their expectations for a good site.

Use a unique domain name. About.me sites are nice for citations and profile building, but not very great for a website, no matter how small. Even if you’re using a website platform such as WordPress.com (hosted by WP), spend the extra cash to get your own, branded domain name. None of that brandname.wordpress.com stuff.

Install an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate, or a Secure Socket Layer certificate, allows you to give your visitors peace of mind. Your SSL certificate ensures that any information they share with you will be encrypted, and not just free for anyone to use. On top of that, Google has made it so that websites with SSL installed will rank better, albeit nominally, as they want to provide a more secure experience for their searchers.

Set up your Google Properties. Okay, so it’s not absolutely essential for ranking or traffic to have Google Analytics and Google Search Console. -But why wouldn’t you want something that can give you an idea of how the search engine views your site?

Choose your website version. To www or non-www, that is the question. It’s not just a matter of semantics, the search engines treat these as two different sites. So, you can have www.brandname.com and brandname.com, and be competing against yourself. Obviously, this is going at cross-purposes. Choose one and stick to it (you can go into Google Webmaster Tools and choose your preference.)

Submit your sitemaps. Submitting an XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster helps them crawl your site and index it. In addition, if you have a lot of images or videos, you can create a separate sitemap for these items. Anything you can do to help the search engines find your site is a good action, right? Right.

Make your website responsive. A while back Google made it so that websites that weren’t mobile friendly were dropped down in the mobile search results. This means a lot of high-ranking sites that ignored the warnings lost out when the update rolled out. Make sure that your site looks good as many devices as possible: desktops, laptops, mobile phones.

Optimize your robots.txt. More than likely, you’ll end up with pages you don’t want to go out there into the interwebz. In this case, you’ll be doing yourself a huge favor by telling the search engines you don’t want them touching that page, or that folder, on your site. Make sure your robots.txt file is tight.

Regularly check for broken links. Broken links happen. You move a few pages, take down a section, decide you don’t like that page’s content. But what goes on the Internet stays on the Internet. Any time you take down a page or find a broken link, make sure you have it point to somewhere. Not only that, but when you redirect a page, redirect to a page with like content. That way the people who’ve linked to you don’t lose out!

Improve navigation with breadcrumbs. Have you ever seen something like: Home > What We Do > Let Us Do It For You? Breadcrumbs not only make it easier for people to navigate your site, but they also show up in search snippets. In short, they also help search engines figure out your site structure. Well worth the trouble of figuring out how to set them up, yes?

Use Rel Canonical tags. “Rel canonical” or “relation canonical” tags help search engines decide which page is the important one in the case of duplicate content. For example, if you have an About Us and a Company/About Us, your rel canonical should point to whichever one you want indexed. That link will be on both pages. You can read more about this in Google’s canonical guide.

Optimize your website’s speed. You can find out a lot about your website with GTMetrix and/or Google PageSpeed Insights. Both will help you pinpoint bottlenecks and speed your site up, which, in turn, gives a better user experience and ranking.

Use a content delivery network (CDN). Content Delivery Networks help websites speed up the delivery of their content. If your website deals with more than just local traffic, chances are that you could use a CDN. For a deeper understanding, read Imperva Incapsula’s The Essential Guide to CDN.

Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP helps websites load faster on mobile devices. Faster loading means better ranking in mobile search. It’s a win-win. If you run a WordPress site, this is as easy as turning on a plugin. Learn more about AMP at AMPProject.org.

Use schema markup. Schema markup helps search engines provide more informative results for searchers. For example, you might search for an event online and see dates in the search results. These are rich snippets, created by schema markup. If you’re not familiar with schema markup, or don’t know how to get started, read getting started with schema.

Install Open Graph and Twitter cards.Open Graph and Twitter card markup is code that allows you to better control how your content is shared on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. For example, if you were to share this article on Facebook, you’d be provided an image as well as a line or two of introduction.

Put your content above the fold. The “fold” on a page is the point where people start to scroll down. A lot of businesses believe (or used to) that this prime piece of real estate was best served with ads. Not so. Put your best content at the top and your ads in less prominent position (or smaller).

Remove overlay popups. Overlays are the ads that take over the screen so users can’t see the content until they click the “x” or fill out the form. Make sure your popups aren’t intrusive and can easily be shut down.

Watch for duplicate content. Always keep an eye out for content that is similar to other content. This is easy to have crop up the longer you’re online. Every six months or so, perform a content audit to pinpoint areas that are similar.

Content Optimization

Content optimization, as you can imagine, is the part the users do see. It’s also what makes your content easier for search engines to rank correctly. What you may not know is that content isn’t just text. It includes images, videos, white papers and pretty much anything else you put online.

Use heading tags. Heading tags are little bits of HTML code that help search engines understand the structure of a page. If you use a content management system, implementing these is extremely easy. All you have to do is tell it that you want a heading one, two or three.

Every page should have one (and only one) heading 1.

Pages should include headings two and three when it helps to break up the flow of content into sections.

Use bullets and numbers. Bullets and numbered lists put the content into an easy-to-read format for easy consumption. Don’t just use them for the sake of using them, but consider your content before you call it done. Can it be easier to read?

Use alternative text tags. Alternative text, or alt tags, serve several purposes. One, if an image happens to be broken for some reason, the alternative text will be shown to give people an idea of what should be there. Another purpose is for screen readers, when an individual is blind. The alt text is read to give the visitor more information. As well, alt tags help search engines understand how to index your image.

Carefully craft titles and meta descriptions. When creating content, put as much thought into the title and description of the page as you do the content itself. The title and meta description are what shows up in the search results, so writing for marketing as well as ranking is very important. When all else fails, aim for humans instead of machine.

Use keywords for humans and search. Keywords may seem like just a search engine thing, but people use them, too. By adding keywords (or key words) into your headings, for example, you help people know what each section is about.

Use alternative keywords. LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, is an old SEO term, but still a relevant one. It basically means using terms that are related to your target term to help clarify what you mean. An often-used example is the term “jaguar”. Only once you use other terms (cat or car, for example), have you clarified what you mean.

Optimize your images. Rather than have large images and shrink them down, try to have your images at the size you need them. For example, if you need a small image 100×100 pixels, don’t use a larger image and then code to shrink it. By delivering up images the exact size you need them, you help your website load faster.

Use short, descriptive URLs. When you create new pages, short, descriptive URLs are easier to remember and easier to share..

Use hyphens in your URLs. Insteadofjustmushingyoururlstogether, use hyphens to make them easier to read.

Create statistics-driven content. If you have analytics, you have a treasure trove of information. Most importantly, you can see what kind of content your visitors want to see. Based on those statistics, create more of what they like to drive traffic.

Proofread before publishing. Always double and triple-check your content before you push the “go live” button. Don’t just check for misspellings and grammatical errors. Sometimes the content can render funky, leaving strange icons.

Connect the social dots. Along with social proof and social accounts, make sure you provide ways for people to share your content and follow you.

Use videos and images. Content is content, and the written word is beautiful, but sometimes you need to break it up with something more visual. However, don’t just use images and videos to use them; make sure they’re relevant to the written content on the page.

Focus your content on the reader. What do they need? What benefits do your readers get from reading your content?

Use infographics for high-powered visuals. Infographics, when done right, can bring a ton of extra traffic. The biggest benefit, however, is backlinks. People link to awesome infographics, bringing you more authority through your links.

Create silos, or topic hubs, on your site. Silos are groupings of pages organized by relevance, usually connected by a central page (think of a folder). For example, our blog has a category for SEO, and also one for social media, and we put related articles in each category. Not only does this make it easier for people looking for similar content, but it also makes your site that much easier to index.

Link Optimization

Link optimization is not link building. Instead of trying to get people to link to your site, it’s about how you link to other sites – or even your own.

Link to other pages on your site. Although you have links in your navigation, having links in your content that points to related pages helps improve your site’s ability to be crawled by search engines. As well – and most importantly – it helps visitors to find more information on your site.

Link to relevant sites. An article about fishing can’t go wrong linking to a web page or site about different kinds of fish. However, linking to a website about cars just because your friend asked you to (or someone pays you to) will only hurt your site. When you do link, make sure it matches the content on your page.

Link out to diverse sources. The fact is, you get used to getting your supporting information from a few, select websites. For us, we might link to Marketing Land, MOZ or SEO By the Sea. However, not only should your inbound link profile be diverse, but your outbound should be also.

Make sure image links lead back to the article. Some content management systems automatically link your post images to an attachment page. Instead, make sure that the link surrounding the image links back to the post itself.

Only link to quality sites. Relevance is only part of it. You’ve heard “birds of a feather flock together,” or “you are who you hang with.” The same is true for the sites you link to. The lower quality the sites are, the lower quality your site is perceived to be by visitors and search engines alike.

Outbound Properties: Off Page Optimization

Off page optimization goes far beyond link building, but link building is a large part of it. For example, off page SEO includes citations, but it also includes making sure social accounts are up to par.

Make sure social profiles are filled out. Don’t just get a social account, make use of the additional real estate for your brand. Carefully fill out the profiles. Add information where you can. Add pictures on the profiles that allow it. Add links when allowed. Make each social profile read like a strong resume for your business.

Build a strong outreach strategy. Outreach programs help build connections with other businesses, people and bloggers. Overall, a good outreach program brings relevant links and positive social proof (not to mention those connections.)

Provide guest posting opportunities (and offer a few posts of your own). Guest blogging is a great way to build additional authority and exposure, as well as an opportunity for link building.

Make sure all outgoing content reflects your brand image and message. Remember, it’s not all links. You ultimately want to create a strong brand. One that pulls people in and gets them to buy (or whatever your aim is). With this in mind, make sure your articles, white papers, videos – anything you send out some place else – is top notch before they go out. Once out of your hands, the chances are small you can fix anything.

Don’t forget your competitors. A competitor analysis every now and again can provide you with in depth, helpful information. In turn, that information can be used to strengthen your own website, either by doing something they do, or not doing something they’ve done because it tanked. Don’t forget this rich treasure trove of information.

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